Friends and Lovers Read Online Free PDF Page A

the room which they had just left.
    Mrs. Lorrimer’s exact voice continued, “We thought he should retire to some place near us in Edinburgh. My husband is a Writer to the Signet there, you see.” There was a slight pause to allow that fact to sink in.
    “Edinburgh really would have been much more of a spiritual home to him. Or Oxford.”
    David had flinched at the phrase. He said quickly, “I’ve always thought that a—a spiritual home is just not a matter of geography.”
    He cleared his throat nervously, and was thankful that none of his Oxford friends had heard him use the phrase.
    “You mean, it does not matter where one lives?” Mrs. Lorrimer was shocked: she was probably thinking of Glasgow, “Emotionally or physically, yes. We all feel happier or less happy in certain places. But if there is any spiritual home, surely it is what we have collected inside our own heads?
    After all, Descartes thought out half of his philosophy when he spent a day in a Bavarian stove.
    And he lived much of his life in foreign armies, although he wasn’t at all warlike. I don’t think he would call the stove or the barracks his spiritual home: they were just places that suited him for examining his own thoughts.
    He didn’t have to talk to people there, I suppose.” Now, he thought, let’s drop all this stuff about spiritual homes and enjoy the garden instead.
    “Really!” Mrs. Lorrimer murmured. Inside a stove—but how ridiculous.
    Was he being facetious? Surely he didn’t mean that people who talked of spiritual homes had few resources inside their own minds? She stared at him blankly. He was looking now at the row of hollyhocks against the wall, his hands deep in the pockets of his grey flannel trousers. She admitted with a certain amount of effort that he was not disagreeable to look at. He was tall, and carried himself well.
    Even when he was standing negligently, as he was at this moment, he did not slouch. He wasn’t handsome like George Fenton-Stevens, of course, just as he had not his charm of manner either. Grey eyes under strong eyebrows. Black hair, thick and rather too long, but then barbers were difficult to find in this part of the world. A mouth which was pleasant enough when it smiled, but it seemed to fall naturally into a firm line. Rather too strong a face, Mrs. Lorrimer’s taste decided as she completed her inventory. Still, he was not unattractive. Mrs. Lorrimer determined to try again.
    “Were you at school with George Fentonstevens?”
    “No.” David turned away from the hollyhocks.
    “Where did you go to school?”
    “In London.” There was a fleeting smile. This insistence on schools always amused him: the safe conversational gambit, becoming suddenly less safe when London was given so broadly. That might, people always thought as they withdrew their cloaks just an inch, mean even a Board school. Mrs. Lorrimer obviously thought so.
    “Oh!” She was vaguely distressed, as if she had been talking to a legless man and had asked him how he liked dancing. “But you are at Oxford?”
    “Yes.” This time he looked at her very directly.
    “On a scholarship,” he said very clearly. Just as your father was, he thought. Just as more than half the men at Oxford are.
    “How interesting,” she was saying, but her voice was far from interested.
    “And what are you going to do after Oxford?”
    “That isn’t decided yet.” It wouldn’t be, until he had First Class Honours.
    If he didn’t get that, then his choice of career would narrow down.
    “Really?” Mrs. Lorrimer was amazed.
    “I thought young men always knew at this stage of their lives what they were aiming for.”
    They know, he thought. Most of them know, but only some of them can talk about it. There is nothing like a nice little private bank account to let one talk confidently about the future.
    Mrs. Lorrimer was saying, “Mr. Fenton-Stevens is thinking of the Foreign Office, I hear. A diplomat’s life must be so